Felix Gilman - The Half-Made World

T HE H ALF -M ADE W ORLD

TOR BOOKS BY FELIX GILMAN

The Half-Made World

T HE H ALF -M ADE W ORLD

FELIX GILMAN

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK

Table of Contents

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in
this novel are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE HALF-MADE WORLD

Copyright 2010 by Felix Gilman

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 978-0-7653-2552-5

First Edition: October 2010

Printed in the United States of America

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The excerpts from the treatise the precocious ten-year-old Liv reads in chapter 20 are drawn partly verbatim from Hans Grosss 1911 Criminal Psychology.

Huge thanks are due to my editor, Eric Raab, for invaluable comments and support, and to my agent, Howard Morhaim, without whose efforts this wouldnt be here, and to Sarah, for all the usual reasons.

T HE H ALF -M ADE W ORLD

PROLOGUE

HOW THE GENERAL DIED

~ 1878 ~

The General lay flat on his back, arms outflung, watching the stars.

A rock pressed into the base of his spine. Hed hit his head and turned his ankle when he fell, but the rock was the worst of his pain. Other sensations were leaving him, but the rock, obstinately, persisted; yet he was powerless to move. He was powerless to will himself to move. Between his will and his body, there was the noise.

A dark cloud passed before the stars, and their light was shadowed, then returned, cold as ever. He watched the night sky over the mountains burn and wheel, hiss and dance, shudder and fall.

The General was losing his mind.

There were no treesno pines. He lay in a bare hollow, a high flat stony clearing. The General and his last most loyal twenty-two men had been caught in their desperate flight between the Line behind them and the cliffs edge before them.

If the General could only have mustered the will to turn his head, he would have seen the mountains peak. It was dark, and forked like a gesture of benediction. It had been his destination, before thisthis unfortunate interruption. It would have been better, he thought, to have died watching the mountain than the stars, which were meaningless.

In the end, no shots had been fired. No words exchanged or warnings given. The Linesmens awful weapon had simply come whistling out of the night sky, fallen like a stone at Lieutenant Deerfields feet, and poor young Deerfield had gone pale, eyes wide, turning to the General for last words; then the noise had begun, the mad awful noise , and Deerfields wide eyes had filled with fear and blood, and hed toppled one way and the General had toppled the other, and now they both lay where they fell.

The weapon had quickly burned through its fuel and gone silent, but the terrible noise still echoed in the Generals mind. The noise split his mind in two, then in four, then into scattered pieces. The echoes ground him to finer and finer dust. The process was frightening and painful.

The General was a man of extraordinary character. Hed built the Red Valley Republic out of nothinghadnt he? Hed preserved it against all enemies and all odds, hed taken the mere words of politicians and philosophers and hed beaten the world into their mold. As the noise crashed rhythmlessly back and forth across his mind, he held tightly to his pridewhich maybe slowed the process of disintegration but could not stop it.

For twenty years the Republic had flourished, and it had been the finest moment in the history of the West; indeed, the finest of all possible moments, for the Republic had been constructed in accordance with the best possible theories of political virtue. Gun and Line and their endless war had been banishedthe Republic had been an island of peace and sanity. It was gone now, ten years gone, undermined by the spies and blackmailers of Gun, crushed by the wheels of the Line, never to return. But it had lasted long enough to raise a generation of young men and women in its mold, and it was for those young persons that the General wished he could somehow utter, and have recorded, some noble and inspiring last words; but all that now came to his shattered mind were fragments of old fairy tales, curse words, obscenities, babble. He thought he might be weeping. He couldnt tell.

He was vaguely aware of the Linesmen going through the bodies around him. He could see them out of the corner of his eye. Squat little men in their grays and blacks stepping dismissively over the bodies of heroes! They stopped sometimes and knelt down to use their dull-bladed boot-knives to silence murmuring throats. They went like busy doctors from patient to patient. The Generals men lay helplessly. A bad way to end. A bad way for it all to end.

Would the Linesmen notice the General, still breathing? Maybe, maybe not. There was nothing he could do to stop it.

One more section of the architecture of his mind crumbled to dust, and for a moment he entirely forgot who he was, and he became preoccupied with his memories. Hed been a leader of some kind? Hed had some great final duty, which had brought him up into these damned cold ugly mountains; he forgot what it was. For some reason, he remembered instead a fairy tale his nursemaid had told him, many, many years ago back in green Glen Lily, in Ulver County: a tale regarding a prince who set out from his fathers red castle bearing nothing but a sword and, and, an owl, in search of the princess, who... no, bearing a message for the princess, who... the princess was a prisoner, chained in a tower, ebony-skinned, beautiful black hair to her waist, bare-naked...

A Linesman stepped over himblack boots momentarily blocked out the stars. The Linesmans black trousers were worn and smeared gray with dust. The Linesman shouted something, something the General couldnt understand, and moved on, not looking down.

The General clutched at the scattering dust of himself and recalled that this was not the first time hed lain outside at night, under the stars, among the dead, bleeding and dying. Indeed, a night like this had been the making of him, once. As a young soldier he had been wounded in the shoulder by a lucky shot at the battle of A... at the battle of... at the field of gorse and briars, by the stone bridge. He had been left for dead in the first retreat and spent the night among the dead, too weak to walk, strong enough only to hold his jacket to his shoulder and pray for the slow bleed to stop, and to watch the cold stars. Hed been very young then. There he had learned to dedicate his soul and his strength to a bright distant purpose, to lay his course by a remote star. He had learned to be heroic and not to fear death. So hed told too many generations of fresh young recruits.